


what it means to be human

by Prim_the_Amazing



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Gen, Monsters, gen buts its me so its got lowkey logrimmons vibes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-19
Updated: 2018-09-19
Packaged: 2019-07-14 12:33:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16040561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prim_the_Amazing/pseuds/Prim_the_Amazing
Summary: He makes himself think the logical thought: this is because he activated his sword in a tower without asking the AI what it did first. Reckless. Distracted. Desperate to find a way to get off of Chorus. Away from all ofthis,think, absorb everything that he’s learned and realized and that’s happened, decide on a course of action, change. He has to change. He’s a monster. He can’t stand being a monster, now that he’s accepted the truth of it. He can’t live like this. He deserves to die like Felix but he won’t let it happen anyways, despite everything. It’s the least he can do, and he won’t do it. Monster.It’s the logical reason, but he knows it’s wrong. He feels the right answer with every fiber of his being: this is because he deserves it. Agent Washington revealed the truth of his nature to him, and now the tower has revealed his nature to the world, for anyone to see with a glance.Monster.





	what it means to be human

He makes himself think the logical thought: this is because he activated his sword in a tower without asking the AI what it did first. Reckless. Distracted. Desperate to find a way to get off of Chorus. Away from all of  _ this, _ think, absorb everything that he’s learned and realized and that’s happened, decide on a course of action, change. He has to change. He’s a monster. He can’t stand being a monster, now that he’s accepted the truth of it. He can’t live like this. He deserves to die like Felix but he won’t let it happen anyways, despite everything. It’s the least he can do, and he won’t do it. Monster. 

It’s the logical reason, but he knows it’s wrong. He feels the right answer with every fiber of his being: this is because he deserves it. Agent Washington revealed the truth of his nature to him, and now the tower has revealed his nature to the world, for anyone to see with a glance. 

Monster. 

 

He can’t wield the sword any longer. He has dense sharp claws that won’t retract, making his fingers stiff and impossible to curl around the handle of it. He takes it gently in his mouth, careful with his sharp fangs and sharper and longer incisors, and flees. Runs from the tower. Runs from Chorus. Runs from his sins and his self. Or at least he tries. 

He can’t shuck off his own skin, though. 

The small alien ship he’s found can mostly steer itself, with an excellent autopilot, and he takes advantage of it to curl up against one of the rounded edges of the walls and quietly try not to lose his mind. His body feels wrong. Bad. He’s convinced he could ignore it if he could just crawl into his armor and hide in it, just for a while. But he can’t. He’s bigger than his armor now. His thick black carapace clicks against the metal wall of the ship, his gray scales rub uncomfortably against the remains of the kevlar suit he’s wearing, and he’s got brown _ fur. _ Large leathery wings that he doesn’t know what to do with or how to control. Heavy horns that he doesn’t recognize from any kind of animal. A patchy frankenstein of a creature. 

He whines without his sayso, a scared distinctly canine-like sound coming out of his canine-like snout. He bites down on the sound, ringing out uselessly in this empty hull of metal in the void of space. 

A soldier does not feel fear. Armor does not feel panic clawing in its chest. A gun doesn’t want to escape itself. 

The words come to him automatically and thoughtlessly, reflex to his trembling fingers and racing heart, his tail  _ (tail) _ tucked between his legs. A familiar mantra to calm himself down. A soldier does not, armor does not, a gun does not. Not to reassure himself, but to steady his hands enough for him to do his job, his calling. 

The words taste like acid now. More wrong, except it’s not new, something old that he’s accepted into his mind as right for too long. Terrible in its own way. 

He probably couldn't hold a gun with these hands anyways. Useless for anything but shredding a person’s skin open. 

He whines again, pathetic and inhuman, and he doesn’t deserve to be scared and worried for himself. He makes himself stand up, slow and clumsy with his large wrong body, bones in the wrong places (are his knees inverted?), and as soon as he’s in a vaguely upright position he retches the extreme amounts of saliva that had been pooling in his mouth as he’d panicked on the floor. After a moment, it starts smoking and sizzling. Eating through the floor. Acid spit. 

He stares, and then has five somehow even more stressful minutes as he tries to stop a hole from appearing in his spaceship and murdering him. 

 

There’s a bed, but he’s too big for it now. He turns off the lights and tries to sleep on the floor. Stares at the ceiling. Realizes that he can see just as well in the dark now. Closes his eyes. After a long while, falls asleep. Dreams of sprinting on all fours and huntings things, tearing them apart while they’re still alive with his teeth, drinking their fresh hot blood and gorging himself on their flesh, feeling strong and alive and right, natural and thoughtless. Wakes up curled up like a dog. 

His stomach churns and acid pools in his mouth again. This time he spits it into the airlock and quickly releases it into the vacuum of space. He isn’t sure if it's safe to swallow. 

 

He thinks,  _ Felix wouldn’t recognize me. _ He wouldn’t. He’d kill without remorse or significance, like he was just another Sangheili. 

Poetic justice. 

 

His hands are clumsy, but his teeth and claws are sharp. He opens cans and packages slowly and clumsily, eats messily. Vomits anything that isn’t meat. He’s a carnivore now. 

His tails movements are still out of his control, but he’s been getting better at making his wings move as he wishes, even if they still do things he doesn’t like when his body or the ship startle him. 

You’re a monster, he thinks. I want to change, he thinks. There’s no changing your skin (your fur, your scales, your carapace, your leather), but he can’t just hide like a coward in his ship for the rest of his days. He wants to be brave. He wants to be good. He wants to help. He wants this in a fundamental sort of way, in a way Felix could never, would  _ refuse _ to ever understand. He was raised to want to be these things. It’s what it means to be human. He--

\--isn’t a human any longer, is he. 

…

Doesn’t mean that he has to act like it. 

Locus is adjusting. He wants to do something. He wants to do good. 

He lands his ship and leaves it. 

 

He finds an active battleground and starts indiscriminately dragging and carrying prone but breathing people off of it. Some of them scream, struggle, cry, stare, beg for rescue from the monster. Others gaze sightlessly into the distance, in pain and too shocked to process even him. Others are unconscious. One woman gazes at him raptly, and softly touches him as if to assure that he’s real. He growls at her on reflex, and then feels chagrined and ashamed, unsettled by the sound of it. She giggles and strokes his fur. Delirious with blood loss. 

He hasn’t been touched kindly in many years. 

He makes himself tolerate it. 

“Good boy,” she breathes, and his tail stubbornly, traitorously keeps wagging. He despises it with the passion of a thousand suns. 

He stays with her until he sees paramedics fearfully try and edge closer to them.  

 

One bonus is that no one recognizes him as Locus, the intergalactic criminal who tried to murder an entire planet for money. He deserves to at least be recognized and hated for what he’s done, but it does make his vigilante work a little easier. 

It turns out that people are as ready to shoot on sight for a monster as they are for intergalactic criminals, though. 

His carapace is thick enough to deflect bullets, anyways. 

 

He finds a message in a robot’s head, and then a crazy man in orange on a moon. He dwells just out of sight in the shadows, watching, until he reminds himself that he’s not being a coward any longer, and also that if he’s waiting for the simtrooper to stop acting utterly nonsensical then he’ll be waiting here for a long time. 

He tries to walk in a nonthreatening way, but he has a feeling it comes out as more of a prowl. It’s hard not to prowl, even when he keeps himself bipedal. 

Captain Grif, eventually, looks at him. He bursts out laughing. Locus growls at him. 

“S--sorry!” he squeaks. “It’s just! This is a new one! Ha! Kind of a big jump going from hallucinating about your teammates to hallucinating about some hot monster.” 

Locus stops growling and just stares at him. Hot. Of all of the many, many adjectives he’s used to describe himself lately, somehow that hasn’t been one of them. Shockingly. 

Grif is squinting at him. “What are you supposed to be? You’ve got a doggy head but cat eyes and I don’t know  _ what _ that mouth is and  _ are those bat wings--”  _

He wraps one large clawed hand over Grif’s mouth, effectively shutting him up. Grif freezes at the contact, his eyes widening, and then he’s suddenly  _ in Locus’ space,  _ crowded in close and roving his hands over him with a hungry desperation. He’s babbling so quickly he can’t even parse what he’s saying. Locus feels his tail go straight and fluff up, alarmed, and he promptly picks Grif up and tosses him over his shoulder, marching for the ship. 

Lopez can explain the situation for him. He spits out his mouthful of anxiety induced acid before he boards his ship. 

 

“Are you, like, an alien?” Grif asks some time later, his millionth question. “Or maybe a demon? Or a really cool looking angel? Ooh, is magic real? What kind of magic? What rule set are we talking here, Potter or Dresden or--” 

It’s no surprise that he hasn’t been recognized for who he is. Even if Grif had ever seen him without his helmet, the face is different now. Everything is different, the hidden brought out to the surface. 

“--or  _ Naruto? _ Is  _ Naruto _ real? LOPEZ IS NARUTO REAL--” 

It feels, as many things do, wrong. His teeth feel wrong, sleeping feels wrong, eating feels wrong, this world full of no orders and no Felix and fangs and claws and horns and wings starting to feel normal feels wrong. Grif not knowing who he is feels wrong. Not right. He deserves to know. He should know. He should tell him. 

“--I swear to god if you’re a ninja you have to tell me, like how cops have to tell you if you ask them if they’re a cop--” 

The truth that he’s trying to dodge inside of his own mind (like the coward he’d sworn to stop being) is that he hasn’t tried to use his new mouth to talk since he got it. Because he knows it won’t work. It’s got fangs and sharp incisors and a long snout shape. He’s got  _ venom sacs.  _ It won’t work. He doesn’t want to open his mouth and hear the garbled sounds that come out, hear it not work. 

“--and that’s how I got arrested. Are you going to eat me? Are you taking me back to your lair to eat me? Please don’t! Hey have you seen a guy named Simmons, he’s my friend except I’m not his, he’s really tall and skinny and nerdy and--” 

Locus glares into the windshield, infuriated once more by his own cowardice and selfishness. Grif deserves at least the attempt, no matter how much of peace of mind it costs him. Just rip the band aid off. Do it. 

“--kind of cute when he isn’t angry except sometimes when he’s angry too but only when he’s SORT OF angry about dumb shit and just wants to complain and panic and be adorably obnoxious--” 

Locus tries to say his own name. 

Grif stops talking for the first time since Locus picked him up. 

Locus, with the determination of a man trying to pull and break his wrist through a shackle, tries to say his own name again. He can’t manage the L sound, but he manages to slur out a vowel that sounds almost like a small wavering howl, and a hard K sound, followed by a hiss. 

He sits very stiffly and quietly in the pilots seat, glaring stonily into the star speckled darkness of space, not moving a muscle. He’s thankfully sitting on his tail, but his traitorous wings keep minutely twitching with upset. 

Grif, with careful precision, reaches out and comfortingly pats Locus on the leg. 

“I have no idea what you’re trying to say, but that’s okay, dude.” 

No. Why would that be okay? How does saying that it’s okay make it okay? He can’t even talk. He’s never talked much, has gone weeks without saying a word, but. But. He had the option. Not any longer. 

His mind spins for a solution, and he suddenly latches onto an idea. He puts the ship in autopilot and stands up so abruptly that Grif yelps. He walks away and Grif jumps up to trot at his heels like a clingy pet that has to lounge in the same room as you no matter what, even though the entire ship is just one small room. Locus crouches and paws with slow and painstaking exactness at a hidden panel in the floor. After a moment, Grif reaches out and helps, his fingers much more adroit. Locus doesn’t want to be relieved, but he is. 

The panel pops up and is removed. Locus points at the Locus model helmet staring up at them from the newly revealed compartment. Grif stares at it, and then at Locus, back at the helmet, and then back at Locus. He’s gaping. 

Finally, Locus thinks, and waits to be hated and feared as he should be. It’s incredible that it took this to make Grif do so in the first place. He must really be out of it not to be shrieking his head off at the literal monster. 

“You  _ ate Locus?” _ Grif’s voice sharply climbs several octaves within that one sentence. 

Locus closes his eyes and inhales slowly through his nose. Releases it out of his mouth. Opens his mouth and shakes his head no. 

“You… stole Locus’ armor?” 

He glares at him and shakes his head again. 

“You… you  _ are… _ oh my god dude how did that even happen?” 

About time. He shrugs, unsure how to convey the whole story through charades. 

“Or maybe you were like this the whole time?” 

Locus gives him a withering look. 

“Okay, right, no, of course not. That doesn’t make sense. You used to be able to talk. And horns don’t fit in helmets. And wings don’t fit in armor. And your knees are all weird. And you’re even bigger than you used to be, holy shit it’s so impressive. You picked me up like I was nothing!” 

Locus stands up to go back to the pilots seat. Grif, the ever faithful adoring dog given human form, follows him so closely that he steps on Locus’ heels. 

“You look like a demon, but you’re helping me get back to my friends. You used to be really super duper evil, but you’re being nice now! I think I get it. People… people can make mistakes and regret it, and want to do and be different and make up for it. Yeah? Right? I get it. It sucks to do the wrong thing.” 

He doubts that Grif has ever done anything as bad as Locus. If so, it would have made the news. 

“Thanks for trying to be better and helping me, so  _ I _ can be better and help them and then maybe they’ll forgive me and Simmons will take me back after only a moderate amount of bitching. Do you feel bad about how you look now? Since you weren’t born like that? I just want for you to know that you look really, really fucking cool and hot and oops I said hot again haha. I swear I’m not a monster fucker. How would I even get the opportunity to fuck a monster? Well except for now I guess. Not that I’d--you-- uh--”  

Locus turns around and looks at him. Grif stutters into silence. 

Grif can see that he’s a monster, and now he  _ knows _ that he’s a monster, knows him for who he is. Locus can’t even speak to defend himself, doesn’t think he could even if he had the ability to do so. And here he is, praising and encouraging and complimenting him. 

He must be very desperate and very lonely, to cling to Locus of all people. 

His awful, horrible, leathery traitorous wings are wrapping around Grif before he knows it. Grif looks baffled, and then slowly starts to beam. Locus can’t ever remember somebody looking up at him with an expression quite like that before. 

“Is this like a hug? Not that I need or want or like or love hugs, but uh, this is cool,  _ very _ cool, I haven’t had one of these since I last saw my sister who would be  _ all over  _ you by the way--” 

Locus closes his eyes, breathes, and concentrates on trying to coax his wings back into being folded neatly behind his back. And maybe he can stop his wagging tail while he’s at it, and pigs will start to fly. 


End file.
